Teacher Education Reciprocal Program

As western civilization struggles to keep pace with China as an economic global superpower, a UWindsor researcher insists promoting educational cooperation rather than competition is the best way to help all of humanity move up the next rung on the evolutionary ladder.

“Instead of looking at them as ‘others’ we have to look at them as ‘we,’” said Shi Jing Xu, a professor in the Faculty of Education who leads a reciprocal learning program between the University of Windsor and Southwest University in Chongqing, China. “We have to expand the ‘we-ness.’”

Aptly named Broaden the Horizons, the program promotes exchanges for education faculty professors and teacher candidates at both universities to travel to each other’s countries to learn about their school system’s most effective practices. The program was recently supported by UWindsor’s Strategic Priority Fund.

Already, 22 teacher candidates from SWU visited Windsor in the fall of 2010 and a delegation of 18 teacher candidates and faculty representatives from here returned home several weeks ago after a five-week visit to China. In September, 16 delegates from SWU will visit Windsor and program leaders here will recruit another group to travel to China in the spring of 2012.

Faculty of Education professor Terry Sefton was among those who travelled to China this spring, while dean Pat Rogers went with Dr. Xu on a fact-finding mission in 2009. Both delivered lectures, visited numerous schools in a variety of urban and rural settings and were impressed by the quality of education there, the family-like atmosphere of the schools, the level of discipline and the high regard that was paid to teachers. Dr. Sefton suggested Canada has much to learn from the Chinese system, but we first need to get past our media-fuelled stereotypical views of that country’s residents being forced in to indistinguishable uniformity.

“It’s like we think there are two billion people there who are all the same,” she said. “We have to open up our Canadian eyes to see that the reality of China is that it’s far more diverse than we think.”

Xu, who grew up in China, did graduate studies in Bejing and Toronto and eventually joined UWindsor in 2007, suggested too much emphasis is placed on the west’s need to compete with China. She pointed to remarks made in 2010 by U.S. President Barack Obama, who referred to Shanghai 15-year-olds outperforming all other participating countries in international standardized tests as America’s educational “Sputnik moment.” The subject generated a great deal of debate at the time. Xu was interviewed by ABC News and used the opportunity to reinforce her belief that both eastern and western educational systems can learn a great deal from one another.

“We don’t expect to change people in one visit,” she acknowledged in a recent interview. “We just want to plant seeds and build bridges between the two cultures.”

Xu said the program has received tremendous support from Shijian Chen, vice president of SWU and director of its Office of Teacher Education and his team, who “went the extra mile” to ensure it would be successful. She hopes the program will be a long-term collaboration that will expand to include other disciplines from across campus.